Virtualization is a buzzword right now, and it’s no wonder agencies are coming around to the idea of consolidating their servers and storage. Traditional servers do nothing for about 80 percent of their lifecycle, yet they use nearly half their peak energy consumption — a waste of capacity and power.

Server virtualization creates logical machines on a single physical server. At the Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., virtualization technology is proving to be a cost-effective way to make better use of server hardware resources while reducing hardware lifecycle costs and cooling demands, and saving precious data-center space. Virtualization also ties in with the lab’s commitment to be a responsible steward of the environment and DOE assets.

Based on that experience, here are insights on the PNNL experience and tips on how even the smallest IT shops can successfully go virtual.

Taking the Leap

The need to maximize storage capacity and minimize storage management costs led the lab’s Information Technology Services Division to deploy storage virtualization of its business management systems in 2001. With more than 60 terabytes virtualized today, the technology has become one that PNNL uses daily and would be reluctant to do without.

The lab, part of the DOE Office of Science, works on fundamental science and technology development in the areas of energy, environment and national security. It runs advanced systems for scientific computation and relies on a vast array of computational resources to conduct programs that bring together researchers from government, academia and industry. To support that work, IT Services manages multiple business applications and back-office systems.

The IT team found that storage virtualization contributed to a significant reduction of downtime experienced by the lab’s users during storage reconfiguration and relocation of these systems. System outages, even those on the weekend, can significantly affect staff productivity and the perceived reliability of IT service organizations.

For instance, PNNL needed to relocate a storage array supporting 16 terabytes of storage and 21 servers to another data center. By using storage virtualization features, the lab reduced required downtime to a single reboot per server and total outage for the move to five hours, compared with an estimated 126 hours for traditional dedicated storage. That same event today could occur with no downtime at all. Administrators can now accomplish tasks during business hours that traditionally were done on nights and weekends.

Based on the success of storage virtualization, the IT Services Division began eyeing similar virtualization technologies with the hope of eliminating a large number of physical servers.

Quick Payoff

After evaluating virtualization technologies and building an environment to support virtual servers, the team rolled out a server virtualization pilot project in late 2005. As summer 2006 approached with record-breaking temperatures, the need to accelerate the pilot literally heated up when power, cooling and floor space reached critical limits in the primary data center while the IT Services Division awaited planned capacity upgrades.

The lab gained efficiencies in cooling because virtualization allowed it to radically reduce its cable installation beneath the data center’s raised floors.

Electrical breakers tripped, servers went down, and suddenly, the crunch on space and resources forced the team to go full speed ahead with the virtualization effort. This decision paid off immediately. By virtualizing 69 management system servers into 12 physical servers — a six-to-one reduction — power and cooling demand fell 7 percent. The team saved PNNL more than $80,000 in 2006; savings in 2007 doubled to nearly $175,000.

Moreover, virtual server relocation and system maintenance can be accomplished with no impact on the users. Less physical server maintenance means increased availability for them, while memory replacement or other hardware issues have become transparent. Through live migration, PNNL frequently performs hardware maintenance and patching on the virtualization layer of the physical hosts without causing any application or IT service downtime.

Another Set of Eyes

Choosing which servers to virtualize first takes careful consideration. PNNL has made it a best practice to choose good candidates based on resource requirements. Often, a server that is quietly doing its job is a better candidate than a more demanding, resource-intensive system, such as one running a large relational database.

A CPU-intensive server can take twice the time and expense to virtualize than it would take to virtualize four or five other servers. In that case, the right decision might be to leave the demand-intensive application running on a physical server. As virtualization technologies mature, even resource-intensive, relational databases become possible candidates. But waiting to virtualize heavy workloads until last remains a prudent course of action so that your team can gain experience. Currently, any new server or server needing life-cycle replacement is a candidate for virtualization.

It is valuable to have another team review the proposed policies and practices when undergoing an ambitious virtualization project. Halfway through the first project, PNNL contracted an experienced third-party company to assess its physical servers. The assessment not only validated the lab’s choices but also pointed out additional physical servers that would be excellent candidates for virtualization.

Green and Lean

Today, the lab’s IT Services Division runs 136 virtual machines on 23 physical servers and plans to virtualize 40 more in 2008. The group manages 400 servers for all types of management systems, including payroll, finance and human resources. (Scientific computing virtualization at the lab is conducted under a separate effort.)

But virtualization isn’t just for large and midsize organizations; small IT shops can save money and resources by virtualizing, too. Consider this: Instead of investing in eight physical servers, your agency could purchase two and run virtual servers on them.

You will get the best benefit if you have a storage area network. Without a SAN you might sacrifice features such as live migration between hosts, but you will still get the benefit of using fewer physical servers to host your server environment.

The PNNL team has measured the greatest bang for the buck in cost avoidance, lifecycle expenses and savings for the demand on power and cooling. With so many paybacks, every IT shop should consider some level of server — and storage — virtualization.

Ready to Go: 10 Tips for Virtualization

1Treat Virtualization as a Critical Project

Make sure you identify your goals and expected outcomes before you start. The infrastructure you create will vary greatly depending on the intended outcomes. Include careful planning and testing, and a pilot project. Seek high-level management sponsorship. The investment in setting up the infrastructure, getting acceptance of policy changes and realization of return on investment depends on management support.

2Deploy the Staff and Infrastructure Resources to Make It Successful

Put together a technically strong team and don’t shortchange your infrastructure with equipment that is not up to the challenge. Taking shortcuts is a sure way to fail.

3Plan for Resistance to Change

Customers might insist on wanting a physical server just because that is what they have always had. Pilot projects with amenable users are often a good way to get buy-in and prove that virtualization works. Wider adoption will often depend on proven success, support frommanagement and policy changes in how servers are provisioned.

4Develop Procedures to Prevent Virtual Server Sprawl

Just because you can create a virtual server in a few minutes doesn’t mean it is the optimal use of organizational resources. Virtual servers might appear to be “free,” but remember to include the cost of the operating system and applications as well as the physical infrastructure that needs to grow (storage and computing capacity). When server provisioning can move from taking weeks or days to minutes (mostly depending on policy and procedures), the requests for server resources will also accelerate — especially if you haven’t already determined how the infrastructure will be paid for.

5Don’t Skimp Later

During the initial stages of a pilot and wider acceptance, infrastructure needs can be more than paid for with savings actualized by not requiring physical servers for all lifecycle replacements. But over the long haul, make sure to have a plan and funding to maintain the new virtual environment.

Some cultures respect the expertise of third parties more than that of their own expert staff. Even when trust of the agency’s own staff is high, a third-party assessment can validate choices and ease reluctance. All servers are not created equal, and not all are good candidates for virtualization.

7Build a Reliable, Expert Technical Support Team for Your Virtual Infrastructure

If possible, create a team made up of some of your best and brightest network, SAN and server administrators. Having good support from all three infrastructure component teams can greatly improve your chances for success, reduce communication conflicts, smooth the implementation process, simplify procedural changes, provide potential regulatory separation of duties and facilitate resolution of technical issues, as well as reduce infrastructure funding requirements by gaining a good understanding of the technologies and avoiding unnecessary duplication of physical infrastructure.

8Seek Validation of Planned Infrastructure Components From Both the Virtualization Vendor and Your Storage Vendor

All components must be well supported and compatible. Successful virtualization requires tight integration of all physical infrastructures.

9Address the Nitty-Gritty Details

Ask questions of yourself and your team. What is your policy for new server deployments (virtual first)? How will you handle virtual to physical transitions if what appeared to be a good candidate actually isn’t? What features are important (live migration between physical servers, high availability, automated load balancing)? How are you going to patch your virtualization engine?

10The More You Share, the More Others Will Benefit

Whether you present at conferences or write papers, share your knowledge with management, stakeholders and other IT professionals. In return, they will share with you.

Reasons to Hold Off — for Now

Although moving to a virtual environment generally makes sense, there are instances when it may not be the right option. Hold off if:

The cost-benefit analysis favors staying with the current setup. Sometimes a server is not a good choice simply because memory or CPU resource requirements make it more expensive to virtualize than to leave it running on a physical server.

The current budget plans don’t fund lifecycle replacement and growth of the virtual infrastructure. Make sure to revise budget plans and get commitment for future funds from senior management. Skimping on upgrades to the virtual infrastructure is far more disastrous to availability and reliability than skimping on a single application server.

Training needs to take place. Start with a handful of the best people and assimilate others as the virtual infrastructure and staff experience with managing virtual systems mature.